Milan-based startup Cato announced it has secured €6 million in seed funding led by Keen Venture Partners, with backing from Italian Founders Fund, Vento, HEARTFELT_, Moonstone, B Heroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture. The company, which builds AI software to navigate the labyrinthine world of public tenders, previously raised €1.6 million in a pre-seed round led by Italian Founders Fund, bringing its total capital raised to €7.6 million, according to Keen Venture Partners.
The startup declined to disclose its valuation, though investors are betting on a decidedly unsexy premise: that artificial intelligence can finally crack one of Europe's most bureaucratic puzzles.
"Public procurement is one of the last giant unautomated workflows in the European economy: trillions of euros a year, and the supplier side has essentially had no software, let alone AI," said Briehan Burke, a general partner at Keen Venture Partners.
The numbers bear out that scale. Public procurement in Italy alone reached €309.7 billion in 2024, climbing 13.9% by value and 7.6% by the number of procedures, according to ANAC, Italy's national anti-corruption authority. Across the European Union, public procurement represents roughly 14% of GDP, translating to somewhere between €2.0 trillion and €2.5 trillion annually spread across more than 250,000 contracting authorities, per a European Parliament factsheet.
Yet for all that volume, the process remains stubbornly analog. Companies hunting for government contracts wade through thousands of tender notices, each with its own requirements, contradictions, and administrative peculiarities. That's where Cato comes in.
The platform monitors more than 27,000 tender sources in real time, according to Keen Venture Partners. It ranks opportunities by likelihood of success, parses tender documents to extract requirements and evaluation criteria, flags contradictions in the fine print, and drafts both administrative and technical bids pre-filled from a company's existing materials. The startup serves sectors including medical devices, construction, IT and services. Among its customers are SOL Group, MOVI, CNS – Consorzio Nazionale Servizi, and Kaster Medical Technology, according to its website.
The growth trajectory, at least as Cato tells it, has been steep. The company says it expanded from 30 customers at the time of its pre-seed round to more than 150 several months later. Virginia Bassano, a principal at Italian Founders Fund, wrote on LinkedIn that Cato's platform "has already managed 10,000+ tenders" since its launch. The company now employs 35 people, according to Teleborsa, and completed its ISO/IEC 27001 certification in August, a credential valid through 2029 per a certificate issued by DNV.
Co-founders Andrea Zorzetto and Matteo Bossolini launched Cato in the summer of 2025. Zorzetto previously led the launch of Plug and Play Italy and held policy roles at HM Treasury in the UK and at AP-HP Paris public hospitals, according to Forbes Italia. Bossolini, 23, studied at Università Cattolica and ESCP. With the seed round, the company announced that Luisa Gamba has joined from Amazon Business, where she led public-sector partnerships in Italy.
Italy's recent regulatory shift has likely helped. The country mandated full digitalization of the public procurement lifecycle starting January 1, 2024, under its new Public Contracts Code. That's a tailwind for any company promising to automate what has traditionally required teams of lawyers and consultants.
Cato plans to use the fresh capital to strengthen its platform, expand commercially, grow the team, and extend into additional sectors. The startup also aims to support multinational customers outside Italy that have requested help with non-Italian tenders, according to Keen Venture Partners. In July 2026, the company completed an acqui-hire of Avvista.ai, with founder Riccardo Sabatti and his team joining Cato, according to a LinkedIn post by Zorzetto.
Whether the technology can live up to the hype is an open question. Public procurement is complex precisely because it involves judgment calls, political nuance, and relationships that algorithms struggle to quantify. But in a market measured in trillions, even capturing a sliver could prove lucrative. For now, Cato is betting that Europe's bureaucracy is ripe for disruption.
